Salt Project vs. Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Salt
Score 6.2 out of 10
N/A
Built on Python, Salt is an event-driven automation tool and framework to deploy, configure, and manage complex IT systems. Salt is used to automate common infrastructure administration tasks and ensure that all the components of infrastructure are operating in a consistent desired state.N/A
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)
Score 1.0 out of 10
N/A
Visual SourceSafe is a discontinued source control software offering, from Microsoft.N/A
Pricing
Salt ProjectMicrosoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SaltMicrosoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Salt ProjectMicrosoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)
Considered Both Products
Salt
Chose Salt
Puppet was working fine for our needs. We decided to make the switch after our operating system vendor decided to stop official support for SaltStack.
Chose Salt
SaltStack is a newer product, so it learned some of the mistakes that Puppet made. It truly is a system that can respond to events as well as configure systems.
Chose Salt
SaltStack beats all of the tools above since it is a "6-in-one" solution: Config Management, Orchestration, Automation, parallel sys administration, remote execution and cloud management.

The other solutions only solve one or two problems.
Chose Salt
I've used shell scripts over ssh, custom in-house deployment tools, Chef, and SaltStack. I've evaluated Ansible, but I was never happy with performance over SSH. Chef's loose configuration data model and lack of philosophy and conventions around use makes it difficult for a …
Chose Salt
Chef and Puppet both require writing code, which I view as excessively involved for the task at hand. I have only needed to write pure python for a handful of Saltstack use cases - everything else has been configuration files.

Ansible, while elegant and simple, simply does not …
Chose Salt
We moved to SaltStack from Puppet about 3 years ago. Puppet just has too much of a learning curve and we inherited it from an old IT regime. We wanted something we could start fresh with. Our team has never looked back. SaltStack is so much easier for us to use and maintain.
Chose Salt
Ansible and Salt have emerged around the same time, and are pretty close.

Ansible pros:
Chose Salt
I looked at Chef and Ansible but it was a long time ago and I don't remember the pros and cons compared to SaltStack.
When I arrived at my company, Saltstack was already used in production so there has been no discussion about other deployment and automation solutions
Chose Salt
  • Puppet - ugly and heavy, ruby-based, although has the best set of production-ready modules and can be a good choice for big enterprise.
  • Chef - outdated, ruby-based.
  • Ansible - slow due to ssh transport, but is the best alternative for SaltStack.
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)
Chose Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)
Azure DevOps is a much better, more modern tool that Visual SourceSafe and everyone should be moving to it. Most if not all the integration that is there can be done or emulated in it.
Chose Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)
We selected Microsoft Visual SourceSafe because at the time none of these other products were out there. Now we are trying to migrate all our legacy code from Visual SourceSafe to Azure DevOps. Unfortunately we don't have a value proposition for some of the older products so …
Chose Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)
Git is a much more elaborated tool for file versioning than Visual SourceSafe. It has superior performance and stability, it is cross-platform, distributed, it gives you a better User Interface (if you choose to buy Bitbucket), it allows you to have big projects with big teams, …
Best Alternatives
Salt ProjectMicrosoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)
Small Businesses
HashiCorp Terraform
HashiCorp Terraform
Score 8.5 out of 10
Salt
Salt
Score 6.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Ansible
Ansible
Score 9.2 out of 10
Salt
Salt
Score 6.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Ansible
Ansible
Score 9.2 out of 10
Perforce P4
Perforce P4
Score 7.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Salt ProjectMicrosoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(0 ratings)
1.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
3.8
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.2
(0 ratings)
4.2
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Salt ProjectMicrosoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
Managing heterogeneous environments of large numbers of nodes, especially nodes which may need sudden changes (security updates, for instance), or frequent replacement, is a strength for Saltstack. Simplicity is not a strength for Saltstack. In a homogenous environment (all CentOS 7, for example, with no Debian or Windows) I might recommend using Ansible instead - it is less flexible and granular, but simpler to configure.
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The only time I could recommend Microsoft Visual SourceSafe would be for a beginner who has a small amount of code that they would like to keep track of. This solution would not be recommended for an enterprise or any shop where you have multiple developers working on the same solution.
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Pros
  • A superb remote execution framework! SaltStack allows us to easily program numerous functions on top of it. For example, we developed a fast parallel asynchronous deployment tool that handles all software deployment, including interdependent service management.
  • Configuration management is now easy. We take advantage of this to automate (in tandem with AWS tools) the stand-up of all servers and services. It is also relatively easy to create new configuration management states for software not yet supported by the community (e.g. Grafana).
  • Flexibility. Numerous small utilities have been built which simply wrap around SaltStack to allow tedious tasks to become easy.
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  • avoid losing code
  • versioning of previous projects
  • saving versions on db
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Cons
  • Managing network hardware should be more native and easy
  • SaltStack should buffer jobs and, when a client returns, make sure it is executed proberly
  • SaltStack should provide basic pillar and states structures to help get newbies started
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  • Becoming corrupt and having to be rebuild from a previous version.
  • It can be extremely slow to check in & out of.
  • Lost support several years ago from Microsoft.
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Usability
No answers on this topic
Overall Microsoft Visual Source Safe is very easy to use. It is a simple application that does only one thing. It has the basic windows tree structure for listing projects and solutions. There is no way to search for a particular file, project or solution. There is also no way to search the code in the files.
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Support Rating
We haven't had to spend a lot of time talking to support, and we've only had one issue, which, when dealing with other vendors is actually not that bad of an experience.
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There is no longer support for Visual SourceSafe as I believe it's been retired. There are, however, users that still use the tool and they do help if there are questions or complaints.
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Alternatives Considered
I've used shell scripts over ssh, custom in-house deployment tools, Chef, and SaltStack. I've evaluated Ansible, but I was never happy with performance over SSH. Chef's loose configuration data model and lack of philosophy and conventions around use makes it difficult for a team to share responsibility for configuration code. Needing to use additional tools to do orchestration for cross-host/agent dependency relationships made me look for more. SaltStack, while not as mature when I first tried it, impressed me with its speed and elegant design
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Azure DevOps is a much better, more modern tool that Visual SourceSafe and everyone should be moving to it. Most if not all the integration that is there can be done or emulated in it
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • SaltStack has reduced the time it takes to deploy new machines for us 10-fold.
  • It is much easier for us to maintain compliance with industry standards with SaltStack.
  • No negative impacts!
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  • When we started using it, it allowed us to do source code versioning and store the code in a centralized location and not locally.
  • We are using it for very few projects with few developers that still maintain those applications and do not have time to merge the source code to Git.
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ScreenShots